Software that doesn't assume a city
SideClick is local-first: the entire practice — notes, diary, billing, AI, exports — runs on your own machine with no connection at all. This page is the canonical account of what offline really covers.
- Offline scope
- The entire practice, AI included
- Seat checks
- Your devices keep the seat they last saw
- Sync
- Every edition; catches up when the line does
- Backups
- Local .cfbak; the sealed server copy
Everything works offline, permanently
Offline is not a degraded mode in SideClick; it is the architecture. Notes, scheduling, billing, outcome measures, exports and the AI assistant all run locally, so a practice with satellite internet that drops daily — or no connection at all — operates identically to one in the city.
The distinction matters because most "offline support" in practice software means read-only caching of a cloud product. Here the cloud is the optional part.
Even the seat respects the outage
Your devices learn their seat at sign-in and keep working on it. Our servers going down, your internet going down, or this company ceasing to exist — none of it can lock a clinician out of clinical records. The same posture extends to the AI: local inference means "no internet" costs you no capability at all.
How a low-connectivity practice actually runs
A two-clinician rural clinic syncs opportunistically: each machine works alone all day, and whenever the link is up for ten minutes, sync drains the queues and both machines converge. Town trips sync the laptop from the library WiFi. Nothing in the day waits on bars, and nothing is lost when they vanish mid-afternoon.
Backups without a datacentre
Rural practices can't treat 'the cloud has it' as a backup strategy, and with SideClick they don't need to: local encrypted .cfbak archives go to a drive in the safe on your schedule, and every entry also reaches the sync server sealed, a copy that updates whenever connectivity allows. Both copies stay unreadable to anyone but the practice.
Questions, answered
What exactly works with no internet at all?
Everything clinical and administrative: notes, diary, billing, outcomes, kiosk, AI drafting, exports and backups. Sync and portal traffic queue until a connection exists — that is the complete list of what waits.
Do I need internet to install SideClick or to use my seat?
To sign in on a device the first time, and for a new seat to reach it. After that the device keeps working on the seat it last saw; a renewal reaches it when you next have a connection. An outage on our side — or the company disappearing entirely — can never lock a rural practice out of its records.
Is the offline experience a reduced version of the product?
No — it is the product. Local-first means the full application runs against the database on your machine; connectivity only ever adds sync and portal delivery on top.
Does the AI need the cloud?
No. Inference runs on your own hardware, which is exactly why it keeps working where the connection doesn't.
How should a rural practice handle backups?
Local .cfbak archives on your own media as the baseline, rotated off-site on your schedule; the sealed copy on the sync server fills in as the connection allows. Restore works in every seat state.
Try SideClick free for 30 days
Full capability, no card required. Your data is sealed on our server and we cannot read it.